Friday, January 8, 2010

Never mind the Fine Print ... just enjoy the Spam

Linked-In is a useful tool in my business, and every three months or so I consider upgrading my account. Unfortunately for Linked-In, I can never see the USD$25 per month additional benefit to sign up for the basic paid service let alone the USD$500 per month for the 'Pro' package so after tooling around adjusting my profile for a few minutes I put away my unused credit card and go back to my regular work.

This time however I clicked through into the Terms and Conditions of the Linked-In service and found this little gem (my underlining):

You do not have to submit anything to us, but if you choose to submit something (including any User generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques and data), you must grant, and you actually grant by concluding this Agreement, a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, unlimited, assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid up and royaltyfree (the) right to us to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, and use and commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, anything that you submit to us, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties.

Is it my imagination, or are we all giving Linked-In the legal right to become the worlds biggest spammer, with the recipients of the spam maintaining their own profile on the Linked-In mailing list?

Now I don't think Linked-In have ever spammed anyone, and since such actions would be enormously damaging to their reputation I doubt that they have ever seriously considered such a strategy, however if Linked-In was bought out by a company such as Centabank then the game might change quite quickly.